Phoebe Cummings

• traditional techniques – outcome ephemeral sculpture
• the work is built where it’s shown
• time-based
• ‘a material performance’
• sometimes work breaks down naturally, sometimes the artist is involved and breaks the work down herself
• materials recycled – clay reused – endlessly be remade
• squishing clay around rope so clay strands hang down – could consider something like this in my own work? building structural supports etc
• how do we record things that are momentary and continually changing? – this relates to my rock tracking and how is best to record this – she mentions inviting people to write and draw in response to the work, perhaps I could consider a more audience-led response in this way? e.g. actively asking what people make of the work rather than explicitly explaining it
• memory and the traces of objects
• creating plants from memory – mixing these in with endangered plants – not yet a memory (links to the orchid flower and the extinct bee from Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet)
• work on the brink of collapse, very fragile – again something to consider in relation to my own work – at the moment I see its fragility as a weakness logistically in terms of being able to move it to document/exhibit it. could i consider making work in location, embracing the fragility this way? as relating somewhat to keskorra
• clay as a raw material – speaks of the ground, compression
• writing a starting point, particularly fiction
• parallels between written language and clay – different ways of realising imagined worlds

• clay has a life of its own
• rooted in craft – links to David’s comment on using ‘craft principles’
• clay shisfts state often – soft to hard, cracking etc
• inspiration from ‘nature’
• blurring of fact and fiction, blending the two
• works that have water flow over them briefly every day so they dissolve over time – also speaks of the clay’s raw state, often being found near water (in riverbanks etc)
• pairing of intense craftmanship with performativity of the materials – sense of a loss
• immediacy of clay
• labour intensive construction vs the fragility – a sense of tension
• the importance of documentation
• the fleetingness of a flower’s beauty being part of its importance – reflected in the work – relates to Freud’s on transience

• she has molds that she presses the clay into and then pulls out with another lump of clay – good method to try?
• also uses brush w water on to smooth
• ceramics from the perspective of science fiction – mutability of nature
• immersive, stepping into the mutated nature
• making a choice to enter the work or stay outside of it
• the artist continuing to work on the piece throughout the show – a live element to it – again could incorporate this to rock tracking?
• (worth researching other artists featured in this film)

• could try a similar thing with the sea? making a work on the beach, with liminal materials and clay from the riverbank, then letting this be re-consumed by the tide

Other research: Peripatetic Making: a borrowed space, time continuum